Projectors are sadly much more fun than they are cheap but ViewSonic is offering to ease the pain with the announcement of two affordable units. Meet the entry level PJD5111 and the short-throw PJD535. The two look more or less identical, so I’m only including the image of the latter. Trust me, it could be a spot the difference puzzle.

The PJD5111 weighs 2.3kg, offers an SVGA resolution of 800 x 600, a very reasonable brightness of 2,500 ANSI lumens and a contrast ratio of 2,800:1. Essentially, it should be enough to give a good picture under reasonable light conditions.

There’s also plenty of image fixing modes and ports in the shape of dual RGB inputs, RGB output, composite S-Video and audio in/outputs too. It’s out from May, but, if you’d rather spend a little more you can opt for the ViewSonic PJD535.

It gives you ever so lightly less in the way of contrast (2400:1) but makes up for it with a better 1024 x 768 XGA resolution. It’s also so short throw that you can get 50″ pictures from it at just 0.9m.

Both machines guarantee at least 4,000 hours of bulb life and work on non-degradable DLP light processors. No prices as yet but, I’m thinking the £500 – £1,000 bracket.

ViewSonic